Early one morning the next week, I was sitting on a back staircase at school, reading. I heard footsteps coming up and jumped, because I was cutting prayers. Chloe’s face appeared just above the banister my foot was resting on, in between the bars. She looked up at me, relieved.
“We’d better not get caught,” I said.
“I know, I know. At my old school, the nuns would send a note home to your parents if you did this.”
“Nuns?”
“Yeah, I went to a Catholic school. I hated the nuns. They were tyrants. Once when I was in third grade—”
“You were there that long?” She nodded.
“Why?”
“My mother.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, I had to go to the bathroom really badly, and Sister Lucille wouldn’t let me go. I kept raising my hand but she didn’t pay any attention, so I wet my pants in the middle of a Hail Mary.” I laughed loudly, and she said, “I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life. They had to mop it up and call my mother to bring me clean underwear.”
“Do you like it here?”
“It’s all right, I guess. Do you?”
“I feel like I’m on another planet,” I burst out recklessly. “Everyone’s rich and polite and I never talk to anybody and no one notices anyway. Well, Patty talks to me.”
“Oh, Patty. What a twirp. All she does is gossip. But she’s nice,” she added.
“Yeah, she is nice. And that’s a lot.”
“I guess.”
Actually I enjoyed hearing the gossip, and not knowing anyone, I believed every word of it. “Do you really think this place is all right?” I asked.
“No. They’re all debutantes.”
I’d been hearing that a lot, and I wasn’t exactly sure what being a debutante involved. “Listen, what’s ‘coming out’? Coming out of what?”
“Oh, when you’re eighteen or so, if you’re in the Junior League or your mother is on the committee or something, or your parents are rich or important, you go to all these dumb parties and you get an escort and you’re presented.”
“To what?”
“Society. The society crowd.”
“Like saying, ‘I’m available to anyone rich enough and proper enough’?”
“Sort of. Everyone at Garfield and Hopps and Briar gets invited to these Christmas balls and stuff. We can join anything we want if we go here.”
“Oh, bravo. Just what I’ve been waiting for,” I said. “Hey—your mother wouldn’t make you do it, would she?” I asked suspiciously.
“Nah. She couldn’t anyway. Those creeps! Forget it, kid.”
“You know what? You know that girl in our class, Jacky somebody, the Greek one?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I think she’s beautiful.”
“Yeah, in a way.”
“Well, anyway, the other day I met her in the bathroom, and she was buying a Kotex from the machine.”
“Yuck!”
“Yuck is right. So I told her I had a Tampax if she needed one, and she said—get this—her ‘mummy’ didn’t ‘permit’ her to use Tampax.”
“What?”
“Yeah!”
“Why?” Chloe said, her eyes wide and dancing.
“Exactly what I said. And do you know what she said? ‘Mummy’ wants her to marry a rich Greek yacht owner, and rich Greek yacht owners won’t marry a girl with a busted hymen.”
We were silent for a moment, contemplating this piece of outrage.
“But it can get busted anyway if you go horseback riding or something,” said Chloe.
“I know. What can I tell you?”
A bell rang just then, and I remembered that we had art together first period. We leaped up and ran down the stairs, down the long corridor that led to the front part of the building and took the side stairway up to five, the top floor, where the art studio was, so we wouldn’t run into everyone coming out of prayers. There was no one else in the room when we got there. One hideous, half-finished painting was leaning against one of the walls.
“Who did that?” I said.
“Rollins. She’s not so bad.”
“You like it?”
“No, I meant she’s not so bad.”
“Someone told me she never takes a bath and the last time she washed her hair was in June.”
Chloe laughed. “Her hair is really greasy.”
“Where’d you get that sweater?”
“At a thrift shop.”
“No kidding?” I was impressed.
“I went with Rollins last week.” I felt betrayed.
“She’s pretty strange. I could never invite her home. Not that I’d want to. My mother would have a fit if I did, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Ah, my mother’s big on manners, and looking—you know—”
“Kempt?” I offered.
Chloe laughed. “Yeah. Rollins looks positively germy. I may look like a wreck, but at least I’m clean.”
“My mother always liked my friends,” I mused. “They’re all at different schools now, though,” I said, turning to look out the double windows at the brownstone roofs. “I probably won’t see them much.”
A few people began coming in, and we went and got two tables together.
“Uh—I was wondering—do you think maybe you could come over Friday after school?” I looked down and said quickly, “It’s only cross-town, it isn’t far. You could stay for dinner.”
“Sure. Well, my mother doesn’t like me taking the bus home too late, and she’d want to pick me up after work.”
“That’s okay,” I said, relieved. “Or my dad could always drive you back.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t want him to do that.”
“Oh, it’s okay! He’d want to. He’s really nice.”
“I’ll check with my mother.” We looked at each other nervously. “I can come over after school anyway, though. We get out early, so we’d have some time.”
“Good,” I said, and went to find a decent box of pastels. “I could call you tonight if you want.”
“I’ll give you my number.”
“I got it from the office already.” She looked surprised and then pleased.
“Then give me yours.”
3
After that we were fast friends. We were at each other’s houses all the time, though mostly Chloe came to my house because it was easier than my going to Riverdale. Mom and Dad calmed down a little, though Mom still wanted me to invite some other people over, too. Just to get her off my back I invited a huge girl named Eliza for lunch one Saturday, and when the time came for her to be picked up—picked up, imagine that—the buzzer was answered by Ben, who announced that Eliza’s father was waiting downstairs. Eliza blushed deeply, and Mom and I looked at each other knowingly. It wasn’t her father; it was her chauffeur. Her embarrassment made me cringe, and after that I didn’t bother with anyone else beside Chloe.
When Chloe finally did get moved into my French class it was the middle of October, and for the first time in my life I sat in the very front row, right under Marese’s nose. It wasn’t my idea; Chloe said if you sit in the front you never get called on, because they pick on the people in back who are trying to hide. She was right. Everyone else made fun of Marese, but we liked her. She always crossed herself and looked up at the ceiling when our responses were more outlandish than usual.
It didn’t take us long to learn to sort out the girls at Garfield. There were basically two sets. One was composed of girls who never dreamed of doing anything without Mummy’s and Daddy’s approval, and they didn’t approve of very much. These were the girls who went willingly to the Junior League Christmas balls with escorts who were sons of Mummy’s and Daddy’s friends, often from West Point, and who, like Jacky, didn’t use Tampax because they always did what Mummy told them. Their families bought paintings as investments. These girls had chauffeurs, cooks, maids, nannies, villas, and tennis courts.
The second se
t was more worldly in the practical sense; while the Jackys had been to virtually every country in Europe and all the “in” islands, many had never been in a subway. These others had as much money and vacationing and such, but they knew how to lie and led their drinking, pot-partying existence with unblanched surfaces. They were often given to ragged clothing, but it was a prop.
So Chloe was just about the only friend I had. Well, there was Lori, the girl in my building. I’d made friends with her when we were about eight. She had a Nazi father who was over seventy, a retired inventor who’d invented several flops that died soon after birth. He hated me for being Jewish and had three parakeets. Lori once had a canary that plucked itself to death. Her mother, a dyed blond in her forties who came from some obscure place in Eastern Europe and had affairs with rich shady men who took her on cruises, replaced the canary without telling Lori of its expiration, except that the new bird was blue. I remember Lori looking astonished and asking what had happened to Birdie (that was its name). Mrs. Frank had explained that she had brushed Birdie with a toothbrush to clean her feathers and they all fell out and grew in blue. We must have been very dumb; we believed it for at least six months.
I visited Lori a lot before Garfield. Her apartment was the creepiest place I’ve ever seen. It was dark and had dirty brown rugs, and in the living room there were two huge prints of Christ in Woolworth-gold frames, with fake candelabras, one on each side of each painting, like altars. There was a leopard skin on the couch and a 1961 copy of Playboy on the table, all of which gave the apartment an air of being a cross between a church and an illegal abortion clinic. It’s amazing Lori turned out as well as she did. I used to go over there and listen to Lori recount her mother’s or father’s latest weirdness with relish. I also knew the life history of everyone in her class at school. Whenever I met one of them, I’d say something like, “Oh, yes, you’re the one who was Joan of Arc in the school play and your brother broke his left foot roller-skating,” and they were put off. I can see how it may have been unnerving. She went to a private school that had some strange philosophy based on that of someone named Rudolph Steiner, whom I’d never heard of and envisioned as being a space-y German who sat around all day doing strange body exercises. The Steiner kids all learned something called “eurythmics,” which seemed to consist of telling a story by waving your arms around to help describe things, like the sun or rain. I found it all very suspicious.
But I didn’t see much of Lori after I started Garfield. Lori was sensible and responsible and dependable; Chloe was always late and always lost things. When she liked an idea, she had an insane smile that would almost scare you if you didn’t know her, and when she longed for something, she writhed and gasped a lot. She helped me make a papier-maché death mask, which we painted white with red trickling out of the eyes, and she was always taking pictures of me and leaving my head out of the frame because she liked the effect, which jostled my mother. Somehow we just fit. I tolerated every habit of hers that bothered me to distraction in other people.
I told Chloe about my grandmother. I thought it would be hard to explain about her dying, since Chloe never met her and didn’t know me when she died; I thought maybe she wouldn’t be able to feel what I was saying. But she did. It seemed like she always understood when I told her things. Like sometimes someone would say something and my feelings would be hurt; just some stupid thing no one else noticed, and if I told anyone else about it, even Mom, they’d say, “You’re crazy!” But Chloe never said that. “People always tell me I’m too sensitive, too,” she’d groan. “I know how you feel.” She always understood, and she never made me feel dumb or paranoid for letting things get to me. I knew we weren’t crazy anyway; crazy people don’t live in the world, they live in their own and just walk in ours. People use the word crazy all the time and don’t know what they’re talking about. They think being crazy is romantic and creative and wonderful, but I don’t believe any of that. It was great having someone I didn’t have to explain things to—Chloe just knew what I was talking about. We didn’t just listen to each other; we heard each other, too.
One December day I was on the East River Promenade, pants underneath my skirt. It was a study hall and the upper schoolers were allowed to leave the building during study halls and lunch, provided they didn’t smoke cigarettes while in uniform and give Garfield a Bad Name. I was looking over at the factories. I never thought much about places I hadn’t been, except that I might go there someday; when I listened to Baroque music sometimes I thought of courts and balls and chandeliers and how grand they must have been. There were sea gulls whipping around the sky like diapers, and I liked going out to watch them. There had been no one else out there when I went; then an old man came. He walked very slowly with a cane. He wore a greenish woolly coat, nice slacks, and a hat and scarf. He slowly approached a bench. I kept watching him, waiting for him to sit down. He finally got to the bench and when he did, he reached into his pocket and took out a large plastic bag. I looked on, very curious as to what he would do. He slowly extracted a long white handkerchief, bent over and ran the handkerchief over the bench seat. After he was finished, he straightened and put the handkerchief away. He pivoted and very slowly walked away and out of sight. It made me feel weird—like I’d just observed a ritual and couldn’t figure out what it meant.
I looked at my watch and dashed back to school for gym. Chloe wasn’t there, and I knew she wasn’t absent. It was basketball that day, and I threw the ball to the wrong team twice, thinking it was too bad Chloe wasn’t there because she would have enjoyed watching me botch up, and wondering where she was. After I got dressed I was walking down the long corridor which led to the new wing of the building when Chloe came around the corner. She saw me and her lip began to tremble.
“Chloe! Hi, I’ve been looking for you, where were—” She burst into tears. “What’s wrong?” She cried louder. “What happened?” She was hysterical. “Come on, come on,” I said, dragging her into the bathroom at the end of the hall, pushing her in as I heard steps behind us.
“Chloe, will you please tell me what’s wrong?”
She sat in the sink, crying and laughing. “My goddamn zipper broke. I want to be an angel!”
“What?”
“I want to be an angel,” she sobbed.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, but that was Chloe all over again. I thought perhaps she just meant she wanted to fly away, but I didn’t bother asking. The sight of her sitting in the sink in Garfield with her skirt all twisted around her jeans wailing that she wanted to be an angel was enough to make me want to say, “Me too!” But I just said, “Oh, my God. They’ve done it to you.” She cried louder. “Don’t let it get to you,” I soothed, wondering what it was. “It’s not worth it.”
“I’m so sick of everything! I’m fed up! I hate these stupid prissy wasp teachers. I hate everyone here!” She gave a loud hiccup.
“Aw, Chloe, I know.” She stood up and fell on me and hugged me. Then she sat back down in the sink and hiccuped again. I started laughing.
“My uncle Rudy died of the hiccups,” I offered. “He really did. He hiccuped for three whole weeks before it got him.” She sniffled.
“I don’t know why I said I’d take pictures for that lousy alumni bulletin. I lost four rolls of film and that asshole Mrs. Beales still hasn’t given me the shot she wanted in it and neither has Grimes and I’m going to miss the deadline and everyone’s on my back and I had a fight with my mother,” she said in one breath. “Oh, Val—” she began to cry again. “Why can’t I be an angel—” I didn’t know what to say. “And I hate this uniform!” She tugged savagely at her skirt and the button popped off. She was wearing jeans underneath like I was and the skirt fell to her feet.
“Oh, God,” she wailed.
I scrounged in my bag and produced a safety pin. “Chloe? Let’s cut school tomorrow.”
“Cut? But what about Lewis?” Our school nurse called you at home if you weren’t in by
nine, unless you called first.
“We leave the house—together. You sleep over. And we call in—separately—and we do whatever the hell we want,” I explained, beginning to feel uneasy. Chloe was warming up.
“I’ve never—okay. But not tomorrow. I can’t sleep over tonight. Next Tuesday, and we’ll do it Wednesday.”
“What’ll we do?” I mused. “I know. You can take me to a thrift shop, for one thing. I’ve never been, except to that crummy place we went to on Second.”
“Yeah,” she said, her mind off someplace else. “Don’t worry, we’ll think of stuff.”
“I had a fight with my mother, too. About my room being messy. Usually she just says, ‘You’re-a-walking-typhoon-I-can’t-even-look-keep-your-door-shut-I’m-embarrassed-to-ask-Pearl-to-clean-it.’ ” Pearl was our housekeeper. Chloe was looking gloomily at the floor, so I continued. “But last night she started carrying on, about how I’d get bedbugs and how can I find my way to the dresser and all. Well, it’s my room, right?” Chloe nodded. “What did you have a fight with your mother about?” There was a long pause.
“Well, my father, sort of.”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Later? When later?”
“I’ll call you. Oh, Val,” she sighed, and took me by the arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
4
So tell me,” I said, carrying the phone over to my bed.
“Is it okay for me to call this late?” Chloe whispered.
“Sure. I’m just painting the door to my room. Wait till you see. It’s got a big sun and roses and ivy and peach trees. I’m doing a constellation in silver. Got paint all over the rug.” There was a long silence. “Chloe?”
“Shhh!” she hissed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought my mother was listening at the door.” I sighed; I was used to that.
“You are really neurotic, did you know that?”
“Wait a minute—okay. Well, you know my father hasn’t been feeling too well.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
Hey, Dollface Page 2
